The surnamePresley and variants Pressley and Pressly are thought to be ultimately of English origin. Later, if not found in some form originating also in Scotland, the name made its way across the border to that country, then on to Ireland and to the United States. The surname came to prominence in the person of Elvis Presley, the American music icon, but the surname appertaining to him is documentable not to be a British Presley/Pressley/Pressly of any similar spelling, but rather a Preslar/Presler, from what is now present-day Germany. The name transformed into the Anglicized "Presley" in the first or second American generation.

Former President Jimmy Carter, through his mother, is thought to be a descendant of the same Johann Valentin Preslar/Presler, the German emigrant ancestor of Elvis Presley, who along with his family reached America and later the then frontier area of the central Carolinas sometime during the mid-18th century. Today, Presley ranks as the 1,825 most common surname in the United States.

This page or section lists people with the surnamePresley. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.